The flute is one of the world's oldest, most common and most widely used instruments.
The flute is in a family of musical instruments in the woodwind group. Typical woodwind instruments like the saxophone and clarinet have reeds in the mouthpiece which generate a sound that is modulated by instrument keys as it moves through the body of the instrument and out of the throat of the instrument. The flute, however, produces its sound from the flow of air across an opening on the body of the flute.
The stream of air flowing across a given hole in the flute creates a vibration of the air moving past that hole. This air stream moving across the hole creates a vacuum or Bernoulli Effect which causes the air moving inside the flute to resonate at a specific frequency. The player, by opening and closing holes along the body of the flute, changes the effective length of the resonator and its corresponding resonant frequency. The holes closest to the mouthpiece have shorter resonators which, in turn, have higher resonant frequencies. On the other hand, the holes farther way from the mouthpiece have longer resonators which, in turn, have lower resonant frequencies.
While many factors affect the acoustic performance and tone of a flute, all variants of the flute have one common factor: their straight cylindrical shape. Whether flutes are end-blown, rim-blown, or side-blown, they all typically have a straight cylindrical shape.
With respect to an end-blown or rim-blown flute, the user positions the instrument directly in front of his/her body so that the instrument is at a right angle to the user's body and parallel to the floor or sloping slightly downward from a virtual plane that is parallel to the floor. The user plays the instrument with both hands while generally keeping the arms close to his or her sides. This natural position is a relatively comfortable position that typically does not cause any muscular stress to the user's arm, neck, or back muscles because the weight of the instrument is supported in part by the user's body.
However, playing a transverse (side-blown) flute, such as the Western Concert flute such as the one shown in FIG. 1, requires the user to hold the flute parallel to the ground and at a right angle to the head. Holding the flute in this manner places the entire weight of the instrument on the user's outstretched arms. Further, the user is now holding the flute in an unnatural position with both arms extended away from the user's body so that the weight of the instrument can no longer be transferred to the user's body. Playing the flute in this position for an extended period will place a great deal of stress on the user's arm, back, and neck muscles which could ultimately lead to discomfort, aches, and cramping.
The prior art contains numerous examples of devices designed to transfer the weight of instruments from the users' arms to their back and shoulders. These devices typically use straps or trusses to transfer the weight of guitars, bassoons, saxophones, and the like to the users' shoulders and/or back. However, no prior art examples contemplate modifying the shape of the instrument to reduce stress on the users' back, neck, and arm muscles. While the flute is one of the oldest instruments known to man it remains one of the more painful ones to play because the prior art has not addressed a solution that relieves the muscular stress caused by holding the instrument is such an unnatural manner.